Heterogeneity among Fertility patterns of couples employing Natural Family Planning Methods

We illustrate the key concepts of the latent Markov model employed to estimate the probability of conception by considering the C.A.Me.N method to define a fertile window. The C.A.Me.N. proposal is based on the classification of the cervical mucus symptoms into 5 different levels and propose to record them jointly with the daily basal body temperature. We show the results of the applicative example based on data collected within the European Study of Daily Fecundability. The seminar is made to learn the parameters of the proposed model tailored for longitudinal data, to understand how the main effects of covariates included in the model, such as the length of the fertile period and the frequency of intercourses act on the probability of conception and how to predict this probability